The Cost of Finding Information
Your most critical staff spend the majority of their time retrieving and synthesizing information — not making decisions.
3 hrs/day
wasted by knowledge workers searching for information
Coveo EX Relevance Report, 2025
25%
of the workweek — one full day — lost to search
Atlassian State of Teams, 2025
12–16 days
average time to fulfill a single Freedom of Information request
IPC Ontario, 2022–2024
51%
of clerk working hours spent supporting information requests
AMCTO Workforce Survey, 2023
See It in Action
Real examples of complex, multi-committee queries — with grounded answers and source citations you can verify. Ask questions conversationally or search your full document library, with every result traced back to the source.
Has Council approved any changes to the community improvement plan for affordable housing since 2023? What incentives are currently available?
Yes. Council has amended the Affordable Housing Community Improvement Plan (CIP) twice since 2023, expanding the available incentives 13.
September 2023 — Tax Increment Grant expansion:
- Planning Committee received a staff report recommending the tax increment grant be extended from 10 years to 20 years for projects that include a minimum 25% affordable units 1. The motion carried 4-1 at committee and was adopted by Council on October 3, 2023 2.
March 2024 — New development charge deferrals:
- A staff report to the Finance Committee proposed a 3-year development charge deferral for purpose-built rental projects with rents at or below 80% of CMHC average market rent 3. Council approved the amendment 12-3 on April 9, 2024, with an annual cap of $2.4M in deferred charges across all qualifying applications 4.
Currently available incentives under the CIP include the 20-year tax increment grant, the DC deferral program, a façade improvement grant (up to $20,000), and a brownfield tax assistance program for contaminated sites 13.
REPORT TO PLANNING COMMITTEE
September 11, 2023 · Report No. PED-2023-42
Subject: Amendment to the Affordable Housing Community Improvement Plan — Tax Increment Grant Extension
2.0 ANALYSIS
Staff recommend that the tax increment grant under the Affordable Housing Community Improvement Plan be extended from 10 years to 20 years for projects that include a minimum 25% affordable units, as defined by rents at or below 80% of CMHC average market rent.
The extended grant period is expected to improve project viability for mid-rise rental developments on sites that would otherwise be developed as condominium tenure.
Use Cases
From front-line clerks to senior leadership — Preside adds value across the most complex, time-consuming areas of your operations.
Freedom of Information Requests
Clerks can locate responsive records across thousands of meeting documents in seconds — dramatically reducing the time to compile FOI responses while ensuring nothing is missed.
Strategic Reasoning
New senior leaders and CAOs can make sense of complex, multi-report, multi-committee issues — connecting the dots across your city's history to get up to speed and move strategically on the hard problems.
Staff Onboarding
New staff can explore years of institutional knowledge through natural conversation — understanding precedents, processes, and decisions without relying solely on colleagues' memory.
Council & Committee Briefings
Prepare for upcoming meetings by instantly surfacing the background, past decisions, and staff recommendations on every agenda item — saving hours of manual document review.
Research & Policy Analysis
Policy analysts and planners can trace the history of a topic — zoning changes, budget allocations, bylaw amendments — across years of committee and Council proceedings in one conversation.
Staff Report Preparation
Staff preparing reports for Council or Committee can instantly pull relevant precedents, past decisions, and supporting data from across the knowledge base — producing thorough, well-grounded reports in a fraction of the time.
Who We Are
Preside is built by a team with deep roots in municipal government and applied AI.
Jennifer brings over 30 years of experience working in and with the municipal and social sector. Through Charitability’s child care products, she works directly with over half of Ontario’s Service System Managers, helping reconcile and allocate over $400 million in public funding annually. Her career spans management consulting, program design, and direct partnership with hundreds of public sector organizations — giving her a rare ability to translate complex operational needs into tools that fit real workflows. She has a track record of seeing operational gaps and building the tools to close them — from agentic AI cost auditing systems that review thousands of financial statements, to financial risk scoring models that monitor solvency across hundreds of funded organizations, to system capacity planning tools that help funders allocate resources where they’re needed most. At Charitability, Jennifer leads client relationships and product design, ensuring everything the company builds is co-designed with the people who use it and delivers measurable value from day one.
Matt has spent 15 years building applied AI and data science products — from large-scale recommendation systems and knowledge extraction platforms at a major technology company in San Francisco to founding and leading Canada's first municipal AI lab at the City of London, Ontario. There, he led a half-dozen high-impact AI deployments including the CHAI model, a machine learning system for predicting and preventing chronic homelessness that was recognized as a national example of responsible municipal AI and has been used in cities across the world. He brings deep expertise in designing AI systems that meet the compliance, privacy, information security, and safety requirements that public institutions demand — bridging the gap between what's technically possible and what's operationally responsible. At Charitability, Matt leads engineering, specializing in retrieval-augmented generation, document intelligence, and building AI that municipal staff actually trust and use.
How Preside Works
AI-powered conversational search for your system of council and corporate record. Here's what happens under the hood.
Core Intelligence
How Preside generates grounded, cited answers from your records.
Natural Language Q&A
Ask questions or search documents in plain English and get answers drawn from agendas, minutes, policies, staff reports, and bylaws — all with citations to the source documents.
Source Citations
Every answer is grounded in the original documents. View the retrieved passage side by side with the AI-generated answer so you can verify that every claim traces back to the source.
Hybrid Search
Combines natural-language semantic search with traditional keyword matching and a machine-learning ranking algorithm to find meaning-similar content as well as exact terms, dates, and bylaw numbers — then blends it all together into one clear answer or search result.
Municipal Context Awareness
An understanding of how your municipal government operates is built directly into the system. Preside knows your organizational structure, committees, and bylaws, and factors that context into every answer it generates.
Document Understanding
Purpose-built to read the full range of municipal content.
If It’s Digital, You’re Ready
No need to categorize, tag, or build a taxonomy. The AI understands the meaning and context of your content, linking related documents, decisions, and data together automatically. If your records are digital, you’re already AI ready.
Municipal Document Intelligence
Purpose-built to understand the structure and language of municipal documents including minutes, agendas, bylaws, policies, and staff reports. Preserves the relationships between motions, decisions, and recommendations.
Table Understanding
State-of-the-art table extraction reads complex budget tables, vote tallies, multi-column schedules, and financial statements, turning structured data into queryable knowledge.
Multimodal Vision
Charts, graphs, diagrams, and images embedded in staff reports and policies directly inform the intelligence layer. Visual data is fully searchable and can be cited in answers.
Data & Integration
Connect the systems your team already uses into one searchable knowledge layer.
Microsoft Teams Integration
Access your system of intelligence directly from Microsoft Teams. Ask questions, get cited answers, and share insights without leaving the tools your team already uses every day.
Cross-Application Ingestion
Ingests from council management applications, SharePoint folders, meeting portals, and other operational databases, stitching every source into a single, searchable knowledge layer that your system of intelligence sits on top of.
Expanded Knowledge Sources
Goes beyond meeting documents with configurable access to official plans, strategic plans, and white-listed canonical sources like provincial and federal legislation to build a complete system of intelligence.
AI-Enhanced Document Search
Beyond conversational AI, Preside enriches your document library by automatically extracting entities, building knowledge graphs, and generating keyword indexes. Your existing search and retrieval workflows become dramatically more powerful.
Trust & Adoption
Start safely with public records and scale at your own pace.
Start With Public Materials
Begin with just your publicly available council and committee documents — no integration with internal systems required. Preside is an internal-facing staff tool, so there’s zero risk to your infrastructure or sensitive data. It’s the easiest way to bring AI-powered knowledge management to your team.
Grow At Your Pace
Preside follows an onboarding maturity model. Start with public meeting records, then add SharePoint folders, internal policies, operational databases, and other data sources as your comfort and confidence grows. Scale integrations step by step — on your timeline, not ours.
Secure & Private
Built on Open Worldwide Application Security Project (OWASP) controls and best practices, and pursuing SOC 2 Type 2 certification. OTP authentication ties directly to your corporate domain accounts, adding no new credentials or threat surface. All data is encrypted in transit and at rest, access is scoped to authorized staff, and your documents are never used to train models.
Configurable Guardrails
Built-in safeguards constrain the AI to your verified corpus, follow the lineage from recommendations to resolutions to ensure accurate status reporting, and flag gaps in information directly in the answer — so you always know what's known and what's unknown.
Built for Municipal Records, Not Generic Search
General-purpose AI tools and enterprise search platforms weren't designed for the complexity of municipal records. They can't reach where your council documents live, they don't understand how municipal decisions flow, and they hallucinate when they lack grounded source material. Preside is different.
Works Where Your Documents Live
Council documents live in specialized systems like eScribe, iCompass, and other council management platforms — not in SharePoint or Google Drive. Enterprise search tools can’t reach them. Preside is system-agnostic and connects directly to your document sources, and other enterprise records systems, regardless of platform.
Microsoft Copilot and SharePoint search can only index content inside your M365 tenant.
Grounded Answers, Not Hallucinations
General-purpose AI tools generate plausible-sounding answers from their training data, with no guarantee of accuracy. Preside constrains every answer to your verified corpus of real documents, with source citations you can trace and verify. If the answer isn’t in your records, Preside says so.
ChatGPT and Copilot draw from training data — not your verified records.
Understands Municipal Structure
Preside understands how motions flow from committee to council, how amendments stack, how staff reports connect to decisions, and how bylaws reference provincial legislation. Generic tools treat every document as flat text.
Generic AI treats a bylaw the same as a blog post — no structural awareness.
Handles the Full Complexity
Municipal records include large PDFs with embedded tables, vote tallies, budget spreadsheets, charts, and cross-references across committees and years. Preside’s document intelligence layer reads all of it — including tables and visual content — and makes it searchable and citable.
Enterprise search platforms skip tables, charts, and embedded images in PDFs.
Pricing
Flat annual pricing by municipality size. No per-seat licensing, no usage caps, no surprise costs.
| Municipality Population | Staff Size | Annual Price |
|---|---|---|
| Under 25K | 100–300 | $6,000/ year |
| 25–100K | 300–1,000 | $12,000/ year |
| 100–250K | 1,000–3,000 | $24,000/ year |
| 250–500K | 3,000–6,000 | $36,000/ year |
| 500K–1M | 6,000–20,000 | $48,000/ year |
| Over 1M | 20,000+ | Contact for pricing |
Under 25K
100–300 staff
$6,000/ year
25–100K
300–1,000 staff
$12,000/ year
100–250K
1,000–3,000 staff
$24,000/ year
250–500K
3,000–6,000 staff
$36,000/ year
500K–1M
6,000–20,000 staff
$48,000/ year
Over 1M
20,000+ staff
Contact for pricing
Every plan includes
- Full council document intelligence platform
- Natural language Q&A with source citations
- Hybrid search (semantic + keyword + ML ranking)
- All public council and committee documents indexed
- Ongoing document ingestion and updates
- Onboarding and training for staff
Additional integrations, expanded knowledge sources, and Microsoft Teams deployment are available as add-ons.
Estimated Annual Value
$342K
for a municipality with 100–300 staff
Est. 7,600 staff hours saved per year
$8.72M
for a municipality with 6,000–20,000 staff
Est. 193,700 staff hours saved per year
Your most critical people — clerks, policy analysts, managers, and senior leadership — spend less time retrieving information and more time making decisions and moving files forward.
Preside decreases the latency of government decision-making.
Download the Full ROI Report
See the complete methodology behind these estimates — including time savings by role, department-level impact analysis, and implementation benchmarks from comparable municipal deployments. Built for internal business cases.
Common Questions
All data is hosted in a local data centre in your country. Canadian customer data is hosted in Canada on DigitalOcean’s Toronto region infrastructure — your documents never leave Canadian jurisdiction. US customers are hosted on US-based Google Cloud infrastructure.
We are currently pursuing SOC 2 Type II certification. The platform is built on OWASP security controls, with encryption in transit and at rest, scoped access controls, and OTP authentication tied to your corporate domain. Charitability already builds and operates over a dozen applications that process some of the most sensitive financial and personal information in the public sector — including financial statements for hundreds of funded organizations and child care funding data across dozens of municipalities. We work directly with municipal information security teams and know how to build safe, secure, and auditable systems. Security is not new territory for us.
Yes. Preside is system-agnostic and currently supports ingestion from all major council management platforms — including eScribe, iCompass, Granicus/Legistar, Civica, and CivicCA — as well as SharePoint, Google Drive, and web-published document portals. No special integration is required on your end — we handle the connection.
Preside is an internal-facing staff tool. It indexes your publicly available council and committee documents by default — the same materials already published on your website. No personal information is collected or processed beyond staff authentication. When you choose to add internal documents, access is scoped to authorized users only. Public-facing deployments are scoped and priced separately.
Initial deployment with your public council documents typically takes days, not months. There is no IT integration required to get started — we connect to your published document sources and stand up a working instance for your team. It can be a very lightweight and low-risk first municipal AI pilot.
General-purpose AI tools don’t have access to your council documents and are notorious for hallucinating when asked about municipal proceedings. Copilot and SharePoint search can’t reach council management platforms like eScribe where your documents actually live. Preside is purpose-built for municipal records — every answer is grounded in your verified documents with citations you can trace to the source.
No. Your documents are indexed for search and retrieval only. They are never used to train or fine-tune any AI model. Your institutional knowledge stays yours.
There is no long-term lock-in. If you discontinue the service, all your indexed data is deleted and we provide written confirmation of deletion.
Preside is currently piloting with several Canadian municipalities in 2026. Charitability — the company behind Preside — has an established track record serving over half of Ontario’s municipalities through its child care and financial intelligence products.
No. Preside uses OTP (one-time password) authentication tied to your existing corporate email domain. There are no new accounts, passwords, or infrastructure to manage. Staff log in with their work email and access Preside via a web browser.
Ready to see what Preside can do?
Book a demo and we'll walk you through how Preside works with your documents, your systems, and your team.